Dreaming Art Dreaming Reality
“Bedroom”Curated by: Ellen Ginton
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
2005
During my childhood - / slept in bed:
During my adolescence - I waited at the door.
In my maturity - I have flown toward the heavens!
Constantin Brancusi
Imagine a giant bed, disproportional to the human body, covered with pearly white sheets, a pair of pillows and an inviting quilt. Now imagine that the entire space in which the bed is installed is illuminated with bright white light, and the bed occupies the entire space of the room, and is engulfed by charged silence.
In Bed-Room, Nelly Agassi manages to create an image for expectation. Her bed invites the viewer to enter, as it is spacious and temptingly-comfortable. Since it occupies the entire exhibition space, however, the viewers are unable to reach it. The work is multi-layered: Agassi has substituted her body for a bed, ostensibly presenting expectation. The viewers can identify the expectation, but cannot respond to it. The organization of the space prevents their entry. Agassi's expectation is futile.
In preparing for her previous exhibition, Borrowed Scenery (2004), Nelly and I went to the country's north several times to seek basalt stones. Nelly wanted the stones to produce a sound as if something within them came alive. All that while she referred to the stones as heavy weights; during the work process she realized that in fact they were anchors, base points on which to fall back. The fabric extensions that emerged from her dress and wrapped the basalt stones in Borrowed Scenery ceased to be aggressive means.
Supports and resting points are the basis for reading her current work. The stones and empty dresses hung on the wall, the fabric trails that structured the exhibition spaces (Wall Dress, Ein Harod, 2002; Embroidering Light, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2002), have undergone a transformation, disappeared. In Embroidering Light, the trail of a dress on a hanger on the wall extended and filled the entire space. Just about. That trail, which blocked the viewers entry, metamorphoses in her current work into a bed
The body was the core in her previous works, a core that transformed into a bed. Agassi chooses to substitute her body for a bed; the bed serves her as both bed (no') and deathbed (nam), and it is around this dichotomy that her work evolves. The bed, writes Georges Perec, is "where unformulated dangers threatened, the place of contraries, the space of the solitary body encumbered by its ephemeral harems, the foreclosed space of desire, the improbable place where I had my roots, the space of dreams and of an Oedipal nostalgia."! The object constructed by Agassi - possibly a bed, possibly a platform or an altar - is charged with great expectation, anticipation for a decision. The bed is as big as the expectation. The work is full of contradictions: it offers intimate collaboration and openness but at the same time forces the viewer to remain outside, not embracing him; there is generosity and an invitation for couplehood versus an acknowledgement of couplehood as a type of death.
Agassi offers herself and prevents herself, moving between worlds in the space in-between the borders.
Bed-Room reminds me of Constantin Brancusi's Table of Silence (1937): a flat circular stone table standing in a Romanian park, surrounded by twelve stone stools. Their large dimensions transform the objects into a ritual structure of sorts, possibly an altar, invoking a sense of anticipation, invitation; the viewer approaching, can only observe it. Brancusi may have built the table and stools for a race of people larger in their dimensions. Perhaps it is a new invitation for the Last Supper or a reminder of an encounter of the Knights of the Round Table.
Nelly Agass's bed is the elusive place generated by the encounter of opposites. A crossroads, a place that is a runway or landing strip, the place in which one meets the little death in sleep, the place where you fall asleep and wake up, the place of dreams. This bed is Agass's locus of incubation. itis the place that enables transformation of weight stones into supporting anchors. One may recall the habitation spaces constructed by Absalon - minimalist, functional swelling cells which word, in fact, "death spaces." Absalon built houses for solitude. Nelly strives to create open, free and inviting "bed spaces."
Sound plays a significant role: the monumental bed is wrapped with the white glow of silence; the silence is a void, the sound is not heard, but nevertheless wraps everything and contains everything. It contains the expectation.
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pinces, trans: John Sturrock (London, Penguin, 1997), p. 19.
Ori Drumer